People constantly seek and rely upon information that is perishable by nature. Perhaps the most universal and oldest type of perishable data is weather information. Weather information is perishable since the weather conditions or even forecasts are highly dependent upon time. Because weather conditions can change abruptly without warning, people cannot rely upon stale weather information but instead must obtain current, fresh, or real-time weather information if they want to receive accurate information on the weather. Other types of perishable information include financial news, such as stock prices, and sports information, such as scores of games.
People can receive perishable information from more than one source. For centuries, the newspaper has been a mechanism by which people can receive important and timely news. Because of the need to print and physically distribute the newspaper, the newspaper is often at best a daily paper and mainly contains information of events that occurred during the previous day. In other words, depending the frequency of the newspaper, the newspaper has certain lag time in the news which means that the news has aged at least slightly. Radio and television are relatively more recent innovations and can deliver information closer to real-time. The Internet is perhaps the most recent network through which people can receive perishable information.
Between all of these methods of receiving information, the television is the preferred way of receiving news and other perishable information for many people. The television is preferred partly because it is highly passive activity that delivers the greatest amount of information. As opposed to much of the information on the Internet and within a newspaper, a consumer of information delivered through television can simply listen and watch a news program and other than listening and watching the consumer need not perform any other activity, such as reading or clicking through web pages. Television also offers both audio and video and therefore provides a greater amount of information in a comparable amount of time than someone can obtain from reading a newspaper, listening to the radio, or reading text from a web page.
Because many people prefer receiving their perishable information through television, people have come to expect the perishable information to be formatted in certain ways. For example, most television viewers are able to watch a local news program which has news on local events, local weather information, local sports scores, and other such localized information. Viewers also expect to be able to receive some type of national news program, such as those offered on the main networks. For weather information, viewers expect to receive local weather conditions and forecasts not only through the local news program, but also through other sources, predominately The Weather Channel®. The Weather Channel® provides national weather information to all viewers as well as local weather forecasts for a multitude of cities and regions across the country, as well as cities and regions throughout the world. In summary, viewers expect to be able to receive local video programs that contain local perishable information.
As bandwidth increases for Internet users, the Internet is able to deliver a greater amount of perishable information to consumers and deliver that information in multiple formats. In addition to text and images, a small but growing segment of information that is delivered over the Internet is in video format. In this manner, Internet users are able to watch video over the Internet and receive perishable information in a manner that approximates the way information is delivered through television. Because of expectations established through television the delivery of perishable information through the Internet preferably mirrors that of conventional television programming.
Because the Internet has such a wide reach across the world, delivering national and local perishable information to each locality is simply not feasible. Even within the United States, an inordinate amount of resources would be needed to provide video over the Internet which has local content specific for each city or region. The time within a studio is an extremely valuable resource. Any organization necessarily has a limited number of studios and time during which filming can be performed. In addition to the physical limitations, every organization also has a limited number of On-Camera Personnel (OCP). For instance, for an evening news program, a television network would only have a handful of qualified anchors for delivering the news. Also, for weather forecasts, a provider of weather information would have a relatively small number of On-Camera Meteorologists (OCM). Based on the available resources, the provider of perishable information can deliver only a maximum amount of video programs having localized perishable information for delivery to consumers. For example, The Weather Channel® spends approximately 4 hours each day within its several studios to formulate local forecast videos for a subset of its cities and regions. In addition to the costs associated with the studios and OCP, technology in the form of cameras, editors, and web servers forms another significant cost in providing video to consumers over the Internet.
Due to constraints on resources, consumers are not able to receive video programs that are specific to each city or region within the country, let alone for other countries. With regard to weather information, consumers are not able to download from the Internet a video program containing the local forecast for every city or region currently served by The Weather Channel®. While consumers can download a web page from the Internet from weather.com which shows local conditions and forecasts, the consumer cannot receive a corresponding video program from the Internet for every city or region. These same shortcomings are also associated with other types of perishable information, such as financial or sports news.